Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  Closing her eyes—the last thing she wanted to do with a hungry vampire in the room—Keomany exhaled and pushed her consciousness outward, searching for her goddess, for the tether that connected her to Gaea. For a second or two she panicked, but then she expanded her awareness farther, out into the chaos. She had to let it in, let herself feel it more than she would have wished, but she had no choice. Though her magic had allowed her to stifle the strongest and darkest of the urges that filled her, she needed chaos as a conduit so that she could reach the edges of Navalica’s influence and touch the untainted world.

  There. A smile spread across her face. She had found it, the distant, muffled whisper of the goddess. Gaea would not abandon her, and Keomany knew she must be equally dedicated.

  “I’m talking to you, witch,” Charlotte growled.

  As Keomany opened her eyes, the vampire girl tried to tear herself off the sharp branches upon which she was impaled. Something inside her caught on a branch, maybe her rib cage, and she laughed.

  The laughter chilled Keomany, but she took a deep breath and tried to focus, reaching out to Gaea. It had been hard enough to wield the elements before, but the wave of chaos magic that had swept through had made it much more difficult. Before she had been able to tap the pure essence of Gaea, but anything she did now would be tainted. She only prayed it would not be twisted too far beyond her intentions.

  “Miles, can you hear me?” Keomany asked.

  Charlotte laughed again. “Can you hear me?”

  Then she changed. The weight of her flesh simply evaporated into mist, a small cloud that moved with its own dark purpose. The mist swirled and shifted and floated away from the kitchen table, and then began to take shape again.

  But not a human shape.

  With a fluidity Keomany had forgotten, Charlotte seemed almost to pour herself into a new form, that of an enormous wolf, its fur bristling. This time, her growl came from deeper in her chest, a place of even greater savagery, and the wolf that was Charlotte stalked toward Keomany with hideous intent. Somehow, despite her change, Miles’s blood remained on the wolf’s fangs.

  Keomany reached toward Miles, keeping her breathing even, letting herself be suffused by magic even as she did her best to draw on what little purity lingered in the elements around her. If any of Gaea’s influence remained, she needed to breathe it in, to wind it around her like a sheath. The wind that sprang from her hands and encircled her, whipping at her hair, gusted toward Miles.

  The wolf leaped at her.

  “No!” Keomany shouted, shifting to defend herself.

  The wind caught Charlotte midleap, spun her around, and with a gesture Keomany slammed her against the wall. The kitchen clock fell to the floor and shattered, but the vampire was already rising, changing again. The wind gusted around her as wolf became bear, rising on its hind legs, opening its jaws in a furious roar. Keomany’s magic could hold the shapeshifting leech at bay, but she could not kill Charlotte. She could not win.

  You can’t kill her anyway, she thought. This is the bloodlust, it’s Navalica’s doing. She can’t control herself.

  Keomany’s heart pounded in her chest. Panic and chaos fed upon one another, and she glanced over to see Miles’s head lolling over, his last breath rattling in his chest.

  “Fine,” Keomany muttered. “Two for one.”

  The magic felt as if it ripped its way out of her, and Keomany screamed as she tried to hold on to her rapport with Gaea. In that kitchen, she created her own storm. The wind lifted Charlotte and held her aloft, embracing her so fully that even when the vampire turned once more to mist, she could not escape.

  Keomany took hold of Miles’s hand. It felt cool, his heat bleeding out with his life, but reflexively his fingers closed on hers, and then opened again. His chest rose one final time, and his spirit left him with his final exhalation.

  “Goddess, guide him,” Keomany whispered aloud.

  She let out another cry and with all of her heart, all of her will, she pulled on the tether that connected her to Gaea. For just a moment that bond strengthened, as though she had punched a real hole in Navalica’s chaos storm. A great clatter arose as wood splintered, branches growing out of cabinets and chairs and floorboards, sprouting leaves. The wind smashed chairs against the walls and slung shards of dishware like razors around the room. One of them nicked her arm, but Keomany ignored it, enveloped by the surge of earth magic within her.

  For a moment, she felt clean.

  Something she could not see caressed her cheek, and it felt like gratitude. The ghost of Miles Varick or the goddess herself, she did not know. But as her pulse began to slow and the wind to diminish, she knew that his spirit had departed. Miles was dead, but she hoped that she had freed him from chaos and given him a path to peace.

  Staggered by the effort, Keomany caught herself on the kitchen table. The toe of her shoe caught something hard and she cursed under her breath, glancing down to see the iron chest, its lid closed and somehow latched, as if it had its own protections. She chided herself—of course it did. That wasn’t her sort of magic, but she knew enough of sorcery that she should’ve expected it.

  “I hate you a little,” Charlotte muttered as she became flesh and blood once again, mist sculpting itself into the perfect curves of her nineteen-year-old body. In the process, even her clothes had been repaired, broken down into their component molecules and then reintegrated.

  Keomany braced herself, but when the vampire girl looked up, her eyes were no longer black, seeded with red.

  “Only a little?” Keomany asked.

  Charlotte nodded. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I’m still hungry.”

  “But under control?” Keomany asked.

  “Yeah. Whatever you hit me with . . . I didn’t even have a body and it felt like being electrocuted . . . cleared my head.”

  Keomany felt a stirring inside her, an urge toward violence and a sexual arousal at the sight of Charlotte, that reminded her she had only touched Gaea’s essence, not been purified herself.

  “But not completely.”

  “No,” Charlotte agreed, smiling enough to show the tips of her fangs, her body still moving with the alert poise of a beast. “Not completely.”

  Keomany kicked the iron chest. “Then let’s get this thing to Octavian.”

  Charlotte glanced at the corpse on the kitchen table, almost guiltily. “What about him?”

  “I’ve done all I can for him. I set him on the right path, I think,” Keomany replied as she bent down and hoisted the iron chest into her arms. “Let’s see if we can keep the rest of us from following him.”

  OCTAVIAN pinned the scroll open on the coffee table in the Morrisseys’ living room. He rolled the top up and let more of it unfurl from the bottom, reading as he went, but every movement caused a twinge of pain in his chest where Navalica had stabbed her talons through him.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Keomany asked.

  “In time,” he replied.

  “We’re out of time,” Charlotte said.

  Octavian shot her a dark look. He didn’t need the reminder.

  “What does it say?” Amber asked.

  When she spoke, Keomany and Charlotte both took the opportunity to study her more closely. Octavian had the impression that Amber’s transformation from ordinary flesh and blood to wraith, or whatever she was now, had unsettled Keomany deeply. The earthwitch did not trust this new version of Amber. Charlotte, on the other hand, only seemed fascinated by the young woman’s wine-dark flesh.

  Amber didn’t like it. She spun on Charlotte. “Stop staring at me!”

  Charlotte held up her hands and took a step away. “Sorry. I just . . .”

  “I know! I’m a freak. I get it, okay?” Amber snapped.

  “Are you kidding?” Charlotte said. “Whatever the hell you are, it’s totally hot. Makes me want to lick you.”

  “Oh, thanks. Like that doesn’t freak me out even more!”

&
nbsp; Charlotte laughed softly, mischief capering in her eyes. Octavian knew she had only been half joking. Despite all that was going on around them, and because of it, the house bristled with sexual tension. The chaos took the slightest urge and amplified it, so that they were all in an almost constant state of arousal. For him, simply being this close to Keomany in particular was torment.

  Amber’s grief at the news of Professor Varick’s death seemed to have calmed her own chaotic agitation for the moment. She had gone quiet when Keomany told her, mourning in silence save for the occasional whimper. Octavian had decided that was best. Keomany had pulled him aside and informed him of the manner of Miles’s death, of the effect the chaos wave had had on Charlotte, and he thought it would complicate things if Amber knew that Charlotte had killed her professor and drunk his blood. For now, it was better she not know. He needed all the help he could get, and he had the idea that in this new form, Amber might be very helpful indeed.

  “Can we get on with this?” Keomany snapped.

  He looked at her. For a moment she stared back with a steady ferocity, but then she glanced away. Neither of them wanted to acknowledge what they were both feeling.

  “Charlotte,” Octavian said, “can you check to make sure Dunne is still secure?”

  The vampire girl glanced back and forth between him and Keomany, reading the tension there, flush with her own arousal and feeding off the sexual current in the room. If he needed any evidence that it had begun to wear on her, to drive her to the edge of her ability to keep herself under control, the fact that she did not comment on what she observed gave her away. Sarcasm and flirtation were her default settings, but she didn’t even trust herself to go that far.

  “Sure,” she said, and strode to the window to peer outside.

  Just when Octavian and Amber had been about to surrender their hope that their allies would return, Keomany and Charlotte had pulled up in a police patrol car. Norman Dunne was in the back, his wrists manacled and the chain of the cuffs looped through the D-ring on the floor. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  “He’s still there,” Charlotte said, her shoes crunching broken glass as she bent to peer out the window. “I told you he wasn’t going anywhere.”

  Amber knelt on the rug beside Octavian’s chair, looking up at him with pleading eyes, so strange in that exquisitely carved face. Her burgundy hair spilled around her shoulders.

  “Why are you stalling?”

  Octavian frowned. “I’m not stalling.”

  Keomany perched on the edge of the sofa, glancing from the scroll up to his face. “Yes, you are. I know you, Peter. Whatever you’re trying to protect her from, just spit it out.”

  He inhaled deeply, trying to focus. The only way to do that was to concentrate on the scroll and not look at the women around him, especially Keomany and Charlotte, whose clothes were still damp and clinging from the rain.

  “Navalica is what we figured,” he said. “Chaldean goddess of chaos. Mother of the Seven. Though there is some hint in one of the other scrolls that her history goes back even further, that the Chaldeans were only the latest to worship her.”

  “The Seven,” Keomany said anxiously. “Are they here, too? Are they coming?”

  Octavian ran his fingers over the rough parchment of the scroll. “The most recent scroll only mentions them in the past tense. There’s no history here of what happened to them, if they died or left this plane of existence, but there’s also no indication that they remain tied to Navalica. We have to be prepared for anything, but unless we have some inkling otherwise, let’s assume the Seven are off the board.”

  “Until they show up and tear us to shreds,” Amber whispered.

  “One ugly fate at a time, please,” Octavian said.

  She nodded, but her gaze was far away, lost in thoughts of death. He wasn’t sure, but in the dim light of the living room, it looked as though her eyes had a newly purple tint.

  “How did all of this happen?” Charlotte asked with a wave of her hand that took in all of Hawthorne. “I mean, how do you get from ancient Chaldea to some New England beach town?”

  Octavian hesitated, glanced at Amber, and then rolled up the scroll and set it next to the iron chest.

  “Amber’s family,” he said.

  Her face might have taken on an almost alien cast, with its wine-red skin and ceramic perfection, but her metamorphosis into a wraith did not mean she was incapable of showing her emotions. Shock widened her eyes, and then he saw her features collapse into confusion and regret.

  “I don’t understand,” Amber said.

  Octavian glanced at Keomany before replying.

  “Maybe you know this, and maybe you don’t. If you trace the branches of your family tree backward, somewhere along there you have a family who were among the original settlers of this area.”

  Amber nodded. “Dmitri Poulos. He was a sailor.”

  “Greek,” Octavian replied. “That makes sense. But the names don’t really matter. They’d have changed with marriages a hundred times. Probably more. In the midseventeenth century, Dmitri Poulos arrives and makes his home here. Maybe he had a wife with him, but more likely, he found one among the other settlers, one of their daughters, I’d guess. Or in his travels, he met a girl in Boston or Providence or some other port, and brought her home.”

  “Adele Perrault. She was French-Canadian,” Amber said, but now he could hear the fear in her voice, the desire for ignorance.

  She was afraid of what he would say next, and Octavian wished he could tell her there was nothing to fear. But she was right to be frightened of this truth. It would hurt her. Scar her. Change her, even more than she had already been changed.

  “But he would have had his mother with him, or grandmother, I suppose.”

  Amber shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Octavian smiled sadly. He reached out and touched her hand, and when she flinched he was not certain if it was because of the sexual current that flowed through them all, or because she had seen herself in the mirror and despaired of ever being touched so tenderly again.

  “Yes,” he said. “The woman was with him.”

  Charlotte hurried to glance out the window again, checking on Norman Dunne. “Can you speed it up, for fuck’s sake? If it’s gonna hurt, just do it. Spare her the suspense.”

  Octavian knew what the vampire meant. Sometimes it was less painful to thrust the dagger in, rather than forcing his victim to endure its slow penetration.

  “That woman wasn’t Dmitri’s mother,” he said.

  “You mean it was Navalica?” Keomany asked. “How can that be?”

  The wind seemed to gust harder, sweeping the hot rain deeper into the house, where furniture and carpets were already ruined. The house shifted and creaked. But Octavian told himself it was only his imagination, that like the ocean, the goddess’s magic ebbed and flowed. It would soon sweep them into a sea of chaos, if they could not stop her. But she was not here in the room with them. She did not know what magic was arrayed against her, and that was their one hope.

  “When she had few left who would worship her, she went mad and turned on her people. That’s the nature of chaos, of course. Entropy. The center cannot hold. She was too powerful for them to destroy, but they were able to weaken her. Her priests, the Chaldean mystics, knew magic that would contain her, and that is what they did. They removed her heart, the essence of her godhood and her power, and they sealed it inside an iron box with a recording of her history and the components they used for the ritual to bind her. But they could only bind her heart, not her flesh.

  “To be certain that none of them would betray the others, that no one would try to free Navalica to curry favor with a mad goddess, they cast a complex web of spells, enchantments to make Navalica forget who she was, and to make the high priests forget as well.”

  Octavian looked at Amber. “But not only to forget. These enchantments made the high priests believe that Navalica was their responsibility. That the
y were family. Drained of her vitality, she looked like an old woman, and she has been in the care of the descendants of those priests—all of them under the same spell—for more than twenty-five hundred years.”

  Amber stared at him, her bloodred lips open in a tiny pout. Though her metamorphosis had given her the appearance of some kind of infernal succubus, in that moment he saw that she was still just a girl.

  “Gran?” she said, her lips trembling. And she wept, silent tears sliding down that perfect wine-hued skin. “Gran was never . . . I mean, she was never her?”

  “She didn’t know what she was,” Octavian said. “How could you have?”

  “And the Reapers . . . the wraiths . . . There aren’t any others, are there? No one else has been changed the way my parents have.”

  Octavian shook his head. “I don’t think so. From what I’ve read, this is what happens. Living with her, constant exposure to the chaos inside her, causes the transformation. When it happens, the wraiths . . . what you call the Reapers . . . must have faded away, or left this plane. They went elsewhere, wherever that is, until Dunne opened the chest and Navalica started to wake. If I’ve got this right, it shouldn’t have happened to your parents for decades yet, not until more generations were completely assured. But this plane is changing. The barriers that kept the supernatural out have deteriorated. Somehow, Navalica began to stir, and the ocean currents dragged the chest toward her, her magic working without her being conscious of it. And then Norm Dunne hauled it up from the bottom.”

  “So I would have been one, too, if you hadn’t tried to help,” Amber said.

  “This is help?” Charlotte asked. “Turning you into this?”

  Amber glared at her, and Octavian saw a true threat there. She wasn’t a small-town college girl anymore. Vampire or not, Octavian thought Charlotte would do well not to test her.

  “He did what he could,” Amber said. “If not for Peter, I’d be her slave, along with the others. My parents would be out there right now, killing for her.”

  “This is insane,” Keomany muttered.